Fr. Austin Litke OP on His Vocation to the Dominicans

Fr. Austin Litke OP shares a short testimony of his vocation.  He is a native of Henderson, Kentucky. He entered seminary to become a priest directly out of high school, attending the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. While studying abroad in Rome, he met the Order of Preachers – the Dominicans – and upon graduation, entered the Order in 2005. He was ordained a priest in May 2011 and is currently one of the chaplains at the Catholic Center at New York University and the University Church of St. Joseph in lower Manhattan.   This testimony comes from Totus Tuus.

“I started thinking about being a priest when I was 10 years old, because in my home parish there was a young priest who came and I started serving Mass, and the witness of his life, the way that he said Mass, the reverence with which he said Mass, the way that he dealt with people just really struck me and I just had this very deep sense that that’s what I wanted to do when I grew up, that I wanted to be just like him. It took me almost 20 years later, when I was actually ordained a priest, to actually understand what that meant. On the day I was ordained I had about 80 people ask me ‘Do you feel any different?’ And, to be quite honest, the answer was no, I didn’t feel different. But I knew that something was different because everyone from my mum and dad to complete strangers I met that day, treated me differently because I was a priest, because they knew that I’d been ordained for them, that I’d been set aside by God, to serve God and to serve his Church and to serve his people. It was no longer my personality or my gifts in particular, but because I was the priest, I was the one through whom God was working and they knew that I lived for them. “